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were rapturous. All five tried to climb in beside him.
    "Hey, Teft, how'dja do it?"
    "Ladies first!"
    "The Phantom strikes again!"
    "Let's go to Disneyland instead!"
    "Shut up, dammit!" Cotton cried. "Where d'you think you are? Okay, Lally Two and me in front, the rest in back—we'll change off later. C'mon, hurry up and shut up!"
    They scrambled in, Lally 2 in the cab with him, Shecker and Goodenow and Lally 1 and the buffalo head in the bed. "Now listen, hear this," Cotton told those in back. "Lie down. Flat. We've bagged a car and we're armed—we're in real trouble if anybody stops us. You saw that prowl car. So stay down and no talking till we're out of town. Don't even breathe."
    While they flattened out he ordered Lally 2 off the seat and on the floor, he wanted only a driver showing, and when Lally 2 was down, he laid the rifle on the seat and scrouged beside him, bowing head under the dashboard and closing the door. "Teft," he said, "you really know how to drive this thing?"
    "I'm learning."
    "Well. Take it slow—but not too slow. The thing is to get through town without anybody giving us a second look. A pickup with one guy driving and keeping his nose clean. Oh, and Teft, how about turning on the lights?"
    "Lights? Geez, I forgot." Teft found the control and clicked the dimmer button on the floorboard.
    "You guys aren't so sharp," sniffed Lally 2 under the dash, hatbrim over his nose. "Neither of you."
    "How come?"
    "I can't even see, but I bet Teft's still got that German cap on."
    Teft grimaced and took it off and raced the engine. "Ready, skipper?"
    "Fire one," Cotton said.
    Teft geared the Chevy away smoothly this time, asking Cotton whether to stick to side streets or bluff it out on a main drag. Straightaway, Cotton thought, to save time and because it might look more suspicious if they monkeyed around on back streets. This one was Montezuma. They followed it downtown, to the stretch known in the good old days as Whiskey Row, a block of swing-door bazaars in which hard liquor was dispensed two drinks for two bits, beer for a nickel, free lunch for indigestion, piano music for an earache, a poker hand for a silver dollar, and a close shave by .44 slugs for nothing: the Kentucky, the Wellington, the Del Monte, Cobweb Hall, and the Palace. It went up in smoke in 1900. Now, when greenhorn campers came into Prescott for an hour's spree every two weeks, they barged into a drugstore, spraddled up on soda stools, and exchanged decadent eastern paper for malts and nut sundaes and milkshakes and double banana splits.
    "Holy cow," Teft said.
    "What?"
    "The law. That prowl car again."
    "Sit tall," Cotton said.
    On the floor they tensed until Teft puffed out his cheeks and whistled relief.
    The pickup paused for a stoplight at the intersection of Montezuma and Gurley. On its right was the town plaza, a grassy square surmounted by the grass mass and clock tower of the Yavapai County Courthouse. A horse and rider reared upon a granite boulder. It was the equestrian monument to Bucky O'Neill, gay blade and sheriff and faro player and mayor of Prescott and captain of Troop A, First U. S. Volunteer Cavalry, Rough Riders, immortalized by Spanish lead at San Juan Hill and knighted now in bronze. The plaza was beautiful, Hawthorne trees cast pleasant shade in summer, and to the benches under the trees old codgers came daily from the veterans' hospital and the pioneers' home. Domiciliary patients, they were called, not ill or maimed or dotty enough to be confined but too infirm to tap with canes through a society which honored them with pensions and forgot to attend their funerals. In hawthorne shade and to the tolling of the courthouse bell they mustered every day, these fragile warriors, sitting on the benches hour by garrulous hour, cussing and discussing an agenda of dentures and generals, surgery and ingrate daughters, taxes and the Old Testament, politics and final resting places—jogging memory with oaths and basing